Devices of this kind are universally known from the state of the art, in particular in the form of so-called software development suites, such as are offered for example by the firm Microsoft as integrated development tools for the programming languages Visual Basic or Visual C#, and used by typically specialist software developers.
An essential feature of known devices of this kind is visual assistance of the programming work by the operator, namely the provision of suitable modularly structured objects in the form of control panels, symbolic displays of data, databases or other elements of the user program which allow the programmer to generate masks, forms, reports or the like easily and clearly by simply selecting, moving and linking such objects or elements, whereupon source code is generated in the programming language provided at any given time by the generically known code generator unit from such a visual display generated by the programmer.
In this way not only can the manual programming work for the programmer be reduced, but also attractive designs can be generated within a short development time and with a low error rate.